marianco

Evernote support recommends deleting Evernote and all of its support files - everything associated with Evernote on your hard drive INCLUDING your notes and files that you store on Evernote. You have to use an app called AppDelete (or similar) to accomplish this. It is a PITA because you then have to reinstall Evernote then download ALL YOUR FILES back onto your computer. If you have TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PDFs and OTHER FILES and NOTES, this can take HOURS. If you then have to do this again every time Evernote Spotlight Plugin starts crashing again, you realize this is a HUGE WASTE OF TIME and a PITA. You also realize that Deleting and reinstalling Evernote DOES NOTHING to solve the problem: Evernote Spotlight Plugin is POORLY WRITTEN. It should NEVER FATALLY CRASH. It should gracefully continue to work even if it encounters errors in files.

Using an AppCleaner to completely eliminate Evernote and its data (i.e. your notes and files on Evernote) then reinstalling Evernote doesn't work. And it is very inconvenient if you have gigabytes of notes and files to download from Evernote. ------------------------- To solve the problem, I bought a NEW Macbook Pro 16-inch with 64 GB RAM and 2 TB SSD with MacOS Catalina Preinstalled. I then installed Evernote as the FIRST new application installed on the Freshly Made Macbook Pro. Evernote Spotlight still crashes and repeatedly crashes. This means Evernote support has NO CLUE why Evernote Spotlight Plugin crashes. ------------------------- I think Evernote Spotlight Plugin crashes when it tries to read a PDF files that has a TINY AMOUNT OF file corruption. This PDF file corruption can randomly occur when you use files in computer systems. PDF files are COMPUTER CODE that allows the computer to render your file on the screen or on a printer. This is why they are subject to CRASHES when the code is corrupted. Other Apps such as Preview, Adobe PDF Reader, etc. can GRACEFULLY RECOVER AND IGNORE the corruption when reading PDFs because they have good error handling routines. But Evernote Spotlight Plugin obviously does not have a good error handling routine. It simply FATALLY CRASHES. Evernote then will repeatedly re-load the Evernote Spotlight Plugin, which then again repeatedly crashes. Evernote probably has the plugin start reading the next PDF instead of the one that caused the crash. This is why the crashes can stop until it encounters another PDF with some file corruption. On my computer, Evernote will generally crash 10 times in a row when I restart Evernote, then stop crashing for a long time until it does so sporadically. ------------------------- The problem is that file corruption is a fact of life when you use computers. File corruption happens randomly. Good programs will handle the file corruption gracefully and won't fatally crash. They will simply move on to the part of the PDF past the corruption. Or they move on to read the next PDF. ------------------------- Figuring out which PDF file has corruption also is futile. I have TENS OF THOUSANDS of PDF files on Evernote. Since Evernote HIDES the PDFs and your notes in the system LIBRARY directory, and organizes its files in an ARCANE manner, users generally don't have easy access to these files. ------------------------- MY TWO CURRENT SOLUTIONS are either: 1. GET RID OF THE EVERNOTE SPOTLIGHT PLUGIN. Unfortunately, this also causes you to lose SHARING to Evernote. This makes it much more inconvenient to use Evernote and is unacceptable to me. 2. LEAVE OPEN THE CRASH DIALOG once Evernote Spotlight Plugin crashes and minimize its size. That way, subsequent crashes do not interrupt your use of the Mac. These crashes are still logged by MacOS on the Console files. I often run macros using Keyboard Maestro. And Evernote Spotlight Plugin crashes interrupt and throw off the timing of my macros. So leaving on the crash dialog will keep Evernote Spotlight Plugin from interfering the use of macros and other programs. Then when I am ready, I write profanity on the crash dialog so that Apple can forward it to Evernote (Turn on Share with App Developers on the Analytics and Improvements selector in the Security and Privacy Preference Pane). 3. TURN OFF ALL CRASH DIALOGS. This completely sweeps the problem under the rug and ignore it. And other apps can no longer report a crash to you. CrashReporter has 3 modes: 1) default is DEVELOPER mode where it shows you a large crash log. 2) BASIC mode where it shows you a warning that the app crashes without the developer information 3) SERVER mode where it doesn't show you any crash dialog. Instead it logs the crash on the Console Files like always. This way, when you are using your Mac as a server, its operations aren't interrupted by crash dialog boxes. The problem is that you won't know if anything crashes unless you check the Console. But since Evernote Spotlight Plugin IS THE NUMBER ONE CRASHING APP on MacOS, this is a small loss. To turn off CrashReporter by setting it to SERVER MODE, install Apple's XCode Developer Tools. Run the program called "CrashREporterPrefs" set the CrashReporter mode. Alternatively, you can run the following command in Terminal: defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType MODE where MODE is Developer, Basic, or Server. Obviously, turning off all crash dialogs is sweeping this problem under the rug to ignore it. And repeated crashing and reloading of Evernote Spotlight Plugin uses up CPU time that is best used in other apps. I prefer sending profanities to Evernote after leaving the CrashReporter dialog open and in the background to keep it from interrupting my work. I don't know when and if Evernote will ever solve this bug since it doesn't seem high on their list of things to do. But this Evernote Spotlight Plugin is a SERIOUS BUG that interrupts the joy of using Evernote.

That's true. Evernote Web Clipping is a SEPARATE Application on MacOS from Evernote Itself since Mac OS Safari has strict rules on Plugins.

The EvernoteSpotlight quit unexpectedly Bug has been going on for months. It even occurred with me on a NEW MacBookPro 16" 2019 with 64 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD with the only addition being a FRESH Evernote installation. The problem is NOT with the Evernote application. The problem is the EvernoteSpotlight PLUGIN that is installed in Evernote itself. This is the piece of code that crashes. ---------- Evernote supports solution DOES NOT WORK. They want you to completely deinstall Evernote and wiping out all traces and files of Evernote then reinstalling Evernote and waiting for your own files to download to your Mac. EvernoteSpotlight will still crash. Their solution is not a permanent solution. It does not answer nor eliminate why the EvernoteSpotlight crashes. It is also UNTENABLE to repeatedly reinstall Evernote and its files particularly when you have a large database of Evernote files. This takes hours to download. ---------- SUSPECT CAUSE OF CRASHES: I suspect the problem is that EvernoteSpotlight may be encountering certain PDFs that it chokes on when it tries to OCR them for searches. A similar problem was crashing a different app called KeepIt - which has a similar function to Evernote but is a local Mac App what stores its notes on iCloud. KeepIt was trying to do OCR on PDFs so that it could do a Spotlight Search on the contents. But this function kept crashing. I stopped KeepIt from doing OCR on PDFs (since I do OCR using a different App) and KeepIt has stopped crashing. If EvernoteSpotlight could just more elegantly abort OCR functions that fail and simply AVOID crashing the entire EvernoteSpotlight plugin, then this would get rid of the problem. ---------- The EvernoteSpotlight plugin has TWO SEPARATE FUNCTIONS: 1) SPOTLIGHT SEARCH: It apparently allows you to do Mac OS Spotlight Searches on Evernote's Contents stored on your Mac. 2) SHARE TO EVERNOTE: It allows you to Print PDFs to Evernote, Share PDFs to Evernote, Clip Web Content to Evernote. I AM FINE WITHOUT SPOTLIGHT SEARCHES ON EVERNOTE. But SHARE TO EVERNOTE is VITAL. ---------- The villain is the EvernoteSpotlight PLUGIN that is installed within the Evernote App. YOU CAN REMOVE IT MANUALLY TO STOP THE CRASHING. Simply: 1. Select the Finder menu item "Go to Folder..." 2. Enter: /Applications/Evernote.app/Contents/PlugIns to directly go to the Evernote Plugins Folder 3. Then trash the EvernoteSpotlight.appex file THIS STOPS THE CRASHING. HOWEVER LOSING THE SHARE TO EVERNOTE FUNCTIONS IS DEVASTATING TO THE EASE OF USE OF EVERNOTE. I need to be able to Print PDFs to Evernote and to Share PDFs to Evernote. Otherwise, I have to print PDFs and manually drag them into Evernote. This is much more tedious and time consuming. The crashing will stop when you trash the EvernoteSpotlight Plugin. And Evernote will itself run just fine. Crashes will recur only when Evernote itself is updated and the EvernoteSpotlight Plugin is once again reinstalled. IF SOMEONE COULD CREATE A SEPARATE PRINT PDF AND SHARE PDF PLUGIN FOR EVERNOTE and simply eliminate the EvernoteSpotlight plugin, this gets rid of this bug and solves the problem of crashes and will keep us all happy.